Ongoing Management
Use this when the stack already matters and nobody inside the company has time to keep vendors, workflows, access, and reporting stable.
Best fit Lean teams that already depend on the stack, have no time for vendor and workflow drift, and need an operator after the audit baseline is set.
The problem
Your stack is built. But it still needs someone watching it.
Tools get updated. Vendors change pricing or kill features. Automations break silently. The CRM someone set up properly last year starts accumulating junk data. A new team member joins and nobody onboards them into the system.
Ongoing management keeps the stack current, tight, and running. Monthly cost reviews, vendor renewals, workflow tune-ups, and direct access when something urgent comes up. You get someone who knows your operation cold, without the cost of a full-time hire.
What's covered monthly
What stays off your plate each month.
Tool and vendor management
Renewals, upgrades, pricing negotiations, and cancellations handled without you having to think about them. No surprise invoices.
Workflow monitoring
Automations are checked. If something breaks or drifts, it gets caught before it becomes a problem. Iteration as your needs change.
New tool evaluation
When something new comes up, whether a vendor pitches you or a team member finds a tool, you have someone to evaluate it properly before you commit.
Incident response
Something breaks. You message me. I work the problem. No ticket queues, no waiting for a vendor to reply to your support email.
Monthly operational review
A monthly call covering what changed, what's working, what needs attention. Your stack's health in plain language.
Direct access
Slack access for questions and quick tasks. The answer to "how do I do X in our system" shouldn't require a calendar invite.
How it starts
Every retainer begins with an audit.
All retainer clients start with a Stack Audit. Before I take ongoing responsibility for your infrastructure, I need to know exactly what I'm managing. The audit establishes the baseline: what you have, what it costs, where the risks are.
If you've already done a Stack Audit with me, we can go straight to scoping the retainer. If you haven't, we start there.
After the audit, we agree on scope and start date. Month one typically involves some cleanup from the audit findings. From month two on, it's steady-state management with monthly reviews.
Stack Audit
Establish baseline. Understand the full picture.
Retainer kickoff
Agree on scope, access, and communication cadence.
Ongoing management
Monthly reviews, direct access, incidents handled.
Questions
Common questions about the retainer.
What's the minimum commitment?
3-month minimum. After that, month-to-month with 30 days notice to cancel. The 3-month minimum exists because meaningful infrastructure management requires continuity: one month isn't enough to establish a reliable picture.
How do you handle urgent issues?
You have direct Slack access. For urgent incidents, like something breaking, a vendor going down, or a critical process stopping, I respond and work the problem. This isn't 24/7 on-call, but it is responsive access to someone who knows your stack cold.
What's not included?
Software development, engineering work, or major new builds. If we identify that a significant new system needs to be built, that's scoped separately as an Infrastructure Build. The retainer is operations and management, not development.
Do you work with Japanese-language tools?
Yes. I work in Japanese and manage tools common in Japan, including Kintone, Cybozu, Chatwork, LINE WORKS, freee, and others. Most retainer clients have a mix of global and Japan-specific tools in their stack.
What's the difference between this and just hiring someone?
$1,100/month versus ¥600K+ for a full-time IT manager, before benefits. No onboarding time: I know your stack from the audit forward. No single point of failure: the knowledge lives in documentation, not in one person's head.
Need procurement details first?
Need proof or procurement detail before you commit to a retainer?
These pages show the operating model, the delivery artifacts, and the kind of businesses this work fits best in Japan.
Need someone actually owning the stack?
Start with the decision session. If the issue is structural, the next step is a Stack Audit before the retainer starts.